Comptroller’s Election Nears

From the remarks of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, who both addressed a public employee breakfast this morning, the state Legislature is all but set to elect Assemblyman Tom DiNapoli as comptroller – possibly on Wednesday.

Silver was first up in the usual press scrum after addressing the public employees. He reiterated his opinion thatÂ having a three-person panel made up of former state comptrollers H. Carl McCall and Ned Regan and former NYC Comptroller Harrison Goldin forward a list of finalists, none of whom are in the Assembly, didn’t work very well.

“Clearly it was a flawed process,” Silver said, noting that for two days and through 17 interviews, the panelists sat “like bumps on a log, not asking one question, not one question.”

He went on to question the motivation of some of the panelists, making an oblique reference to some buzz/column items thatÂ McCall was interested in the job himself.

“It raises suspicions,” said Silver, wondering aloud if the process was like VP Dick Cheney heading a vice-presidential search committee and then settling upon himself as the best candidate.

Next came Bruno, who agreed ”the process is flawed, so we’re going to start going back to the constitution, going back to the legislative process.”

The state Constitution leaves it to the Legislature to choose the new comptroller, although Spitzer, Silver and Bruno agreed to create the panel for this selection process.

When asked about DiNapoli, a Long Island Democrat said to be gaining steam in his campaign for the job, Bruno said: “I like Tom DiNapoli a lot.”

As to when a legislative vote on comptroller would take place, Bruno said “we’re prepared tommorrow.”Â